Mildred Blaxter

English

Research Papers in Economics

Commentary on 'a Reflexive Account of Reusing Qualitative Data: Beyond
Primary/secondary Dualism' (Libby Bishop)
by Mildred Blaxter
Sociological Research Online, Volume 12, Issue 3, 
< http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/3/7.html> 
doi:10.5153/sro.1561
Received: 22 May 2007     Accepted: 22 May 2007    Published: 30 May 2007
Introduction
1.1 This paper is an interesting contribution to the currently lively topic of the secondary analysis of
qualitative data. As an engaging, accessible, and honest account of (in her own phrase) “how your mind
works” during the process of reusing data from different historical periods it is most welcome: the endeavour
is both difficult and courageous.
1.2 Researchers commonly place a study within their intellectual history, but practical detail like this is
quite rare. It is as necessary, she suggests, to be reflexive about an encounter with secondary materials as
it is about the actual encounter with respondents in real time. She explains clearly why this topic and
method were chosen, in personal and practical terms – that is, notably the need to obtain first-hand
experience of the use of Qualidata data sets, to better advise both depositors and users. Any researcher
will emphathise with her detailed accounts of her approaches to her material, and the phases of her
research - the “meandering but not atypical path” to reassess what data were relevant. She concludes,
convincingly, that the processes of doing primary and secondary research are more alike than not.
1.3 There is general agreement that qualitative data, as the product of the reflexive relationship between
researchers and researched, may produce problems for the reuse of data by those not involved in its
production (Hammersley 1997). There is a realist view of secondary analysis, as Bishop notes, that data
are “out there” and can be regarded as simply “given”. However, she not only emphasizes being transparent
about her own method, but also dwells on how the original studies were conducted and the nature of the
interactions displayed in the data transcripts. Despite her comment that “Data are recontextualised and co-
constructed whether reading transcripts or doing and interview in real time”, clearly she would support the
more common view, that attempting to understand fieldwork relationships and the context of the original
data are among the special features – and difficulties – of qualitative secondary analysis.
1.4 But the “proof of the pudding…” test remains. The crucial issue, in the end, is whether a secondary
analysis does offer a new perspective or useful results. Remembering that the two analyses reported here
are only part of Bishop’s larger research programme, and the paper is an account of methodology rather
than actual findings, the theme is promising. What can historical data, exploring beliefs and practices from
which current uses of convenience foods have emerged, tell us about domestic food consumption as a
setting in which the discourse of choice – described as the “ubiquitous mantra of neoliberalism” - is
enacted?
1.5 This commentary will focus on only one of the two research projects used, .the “Mothers and
Daughters” study of Blaxter and Paterson (1982). There is, of course, a difficulty in that we do not in fact
have the substantive results of the secondary analysis, so it is not really possible to assess its outcome.
However, some clues can be found in this account. It seems that three problems emerge: problems relating
to the research context, those associated with the particular historical and social context of the original
work, and issues about possibly divergent purposes of the primary and secondary studies.
Institutional and practical context of the research
2.1 Bishop acknowledges the importance of paying particular attention to the actual conduct of the original
study, and the nature of the relationship between researcher and researched. Because, except in a
methods paper, the standard journals would simply not have room or inclination for much navel-gazing, this
material can rarely be found in published papers. The data required are probably in research reports, if
anywhere, or in research diaries. Hinds et al (1997) suggest that “Sensitivity of secondary researchers to
the context of the primary study is crucial”, and if this material is not archived, then “access to it and to
members of the study team, if available, could and should be negotiated”. Certainly, secondary analysists
must resist second-guessing things about the conduct of the study that they cannot possibly know.
Misunderstandings can of course be corrected, if the primary researchers are available to comment, buteven if this is done traces of assumption about “this is how it was” tend to embed themselves in the
analysis and remain.
2.2 The analysis here picked up hints about the conduct of the study (eg some personal details about the
researchers) but not others, at the situational and organizational levels, which are arguably more important.
These relate, for instance, to the collegiate organisation of the ESRC’s “transmitted deprivation”
programme, and to the institutional setting in which the research was conducted, including the interest of
some of the original medical researchers who first studied these respondents in a different way and on
different topics in 1950. Many things influenced the direction and nature of the data-collection. There is a
sort of archeological task here, with layers of information to be sifted from all the papers and reports from a
project and from others associated with it. This is particularly true if the secondary analysis relates to data
which were only part of a larger study.
Social contexts
3.1 Hammersley (1997) also commented, “ To understand behaviour one must learn the culture which
informs it”, and a more serious potential problem of secondary analysis relates to what might be a neglect
of, or even a misunderstanding of, the social context, local culture, and history of the research setting and
its population. Bishop notes that not all researchers necessarily share the culture of their subjects, and
how one attempts, as a “foreigner”, to build up sufficient rapport is a common topic of discussion in
qualitative work. Primary researchers would not, however, devote perhaps three years of their lives to
attempting to understand a particular group without a great deal of background study as well as first hand
observation. This background knowledge informs their own analyses but may not be made explicit in every
paper from the study.
3.2 Particular problems may arise where data sets belong to different historical periods during which the
phenomenon of interest may have taken on different forms. The term “convenience food” was certainly
unknown to the population studied in the early 1980s. Frozen food was not used and was viewed with some
suspicion. “Convenient” foods such as custard powder or packeted products, and some tins, were much
used, but regarded as cheap and traditional cooking ingredients. One of Bishop’s research questions was
“Under what conditions was convenience food accepted?”, but this begs the question of what is to be
counted as a convenience food, as she notes, as well as what food was in fact available in this area at this
time.
3.3 It is clear that criteria for “good” or “bad” food are similarly historically situated. Without further
information (difficult to discuss in the one original paper to which the secondary analysis refers, though it
was to some extent in the book of the study and in other papers which derived from it) it would be
impossible to know what this history was. though it would have been clearer to contemporary readers. This
was a group of women with predominantly rural childhoods in an area of Scotland during a period of
particular economic depression. Home-grown and home-cooked food was an economic necessity, but it
was also bound up with the mythical “golden days of childhood” and with the strong moral climate of self-
denial and restraint.
3.4 There are some hints in Bishop’s paper of the dangers of attempting to apply understandings of one
period to the culture of another For instance, she notes that “tinned food as protection from want was surely
more prominent for the grandmothers than would be typical today”: no, much tinned food, far from being
“protection from want”, represented a degree of (unnecessary) luxury or indulgence. As the original paper
“The goodness is out of it” said, these women had grown up during war years, when those things which
were severely rationed were seen as necessities, and those which had been unavailable were indulgences.
They belonged to the generation who, as the novelist Margaret Drabble has noted in her book The Ice Age,
“had always been astonished at their own purchasing power whenever they bought a pound of bananas or a
small pot of double cream”. Their common social experience – a particular national culture with regard to
food, childhood during economic depression, growing up during a war, and the perception of rapid social
change since – was very obvious in their attitudes.
3.5 Of course, as Bishop notes, interviews about values and attitudes must always be considered as
presentations, framed in perceptions of perceived acceptability. Again, however, any speculation about the
possibility of the suppression of anti-health practices and attitudes must be informed by knowledge of the
particular public discourse current at this time and in this culture.
Purposes of the studies
4.1 The literature on secondary analysis agrees that a significant problem arises when the research
question asked in the secondary analysis is different from the original research question. Indeed, this is
always likely to be the case, since even if the research climate did not change historically, there is littleattraction in simple repetition. How far can the research purpose differ without invalidating the effort? (Hinds
et al 1997). The substantive intention of Bishop’s use of these data – to examine attitudes and practices
about early forms of processed foods and about food choices at meals – was not, as she makes clear. a
particular focus of the original study. There. food, and specifically the feeding of infants and children
emerged as one topic of interest within the overall theme of intergenerational attitudes to the health and
care of children in the early 1980s. The interviewers were aware of many other potential threads about food
which might have been followed up, but were not, because they were not relevant to the study’s purpose.
4.2 Savage (2007) noted that the data archived in qualitative studies may contain considerably more
material than was reported in published papers, but it requires investment to discover exactly what this
consists of and bring its potential for re-use to light. In the study being used here, there was observational
data about meals which was not reported. though some information might be derived from various other
papers from the study. Is the “data” which the secondary analysis is based complete, if it relies solely on
what is in the transcripts? Or is it partial, and selected on grounds which apply to the primary research
question but not that of the secondary analysis? “Making things visible means making other things
invisible” (Fielding and Fielding, 2000), and out of the enormous amount which any qualitative study
collects, only that which is defined as data in relation to the original research question is formally recorded.
4.3 An example concerns the observed context within which food choices were made, and the informal
discussions with husbands and other family members about a meal in preparation, which took place in the
interviewer’s presence (and to which the interviewer was sometimes invited by these ever-generous
respondents), not transcribed as part of the formal interview. A vignette: there was a young mother of a six-
year old boy and a baby of a few months, living in a tenement block with no local shops within easy walking
distance, and forced to rely for food purchases on the daily travelling vans which toured the estate. She
lived on the edge of “managing”, lurching from day to day with catering and budgeting. One interview was
interrupted by the chimes of the travelling grocery, and the tape was turned off while she looked for her
purse, and explained that the six-year old was a “good little shopper” on whom she had to rely, since she
did not want either to wake the baby up to carry him down several flights of stairs, nor leave him alone in
the flat. “Get what you like for tea [evening meal]”, she said, and twenty minutes later her son returned
triumphant with a tin of strawberries, evaporated milk and a bag of buns.
4.4 This specific example relates to the younger generation of respondents to the original study, whose
attitudes to “luxuries” had changed. Their interviews were not deposited in the Archive and so not available
for secondary research. In general, however, what may be missing from Bishop’s account is the observed
way in which practical constraints (including often what corner shops or travelling vans choose to stock)
determined food choice for those of both generations who lived in large estates or tenement blocks and
struggled with their housekeeping.
4.5 The purpose of the original study was the comparison of attitudes within the two generations. Sadly,
consideration of continuity and change might have served the purposes of the secondary analysis very well.
The use of this was precluded, however, by the definition of the data to be analysed as solely the deposited
“raw” data, excluding other analyses or research reports.
Conclusion
5.1 Despite its illustration of these problems. Bishop’s paper remains an interesting contribution to the
principles and practice of secondary analysis. A final thought, however, relates to one potential use of
secondary analysis which is consistent with an interpretive qualitative methodology – that is, to understand
the research process itself, unravelling, for instance, the way in which the processes of abstraction which
are inherent in any research are never neutral, but part of the constructions and omissions which inevitably
take place in the social science canon, as Savage (2007) demonstrated with reanalyses of Bott’s “Family
and Social Network” and Goldthorpe and Lockwood’s “Affluent Worker” collection. There are clear historical
influences in both the primary and secondary analyses here. Choices made by both authors and publishers
about the place and form of the publications which these analyses give rise to are also part of this
construction of knowledge. In this light both the primary and secondary analyses here become part of a
new analysis. But perhaps this takes reflexivity too far!
References
HAMMERSLEY, M. (1997) ‘Qualitative data archiving: some reflections on its prospects and principles,
Sociology, Vol 31, pp.131-41.
HINDS, P.S, Vogel R.J., and Clarke-Steffen L. (1997) ‘The possibilities and pitfalls of doing a secondary
analysis of a qualitative data ser’, Qualitative Health Research, Vol. 7, pp 415-23.FIELDING, N.J and Fielding, J.L. (2000) ‘Resistance and adaptation to criminal identity: using secondary
anausis to evaluate class studies of crime and devience’ Sociology, Vol. 34, pp 671-89.
SAVAGE. M. (2007) ‘Revisiting class qualitative studies’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, Vol. 6, No. l,
Art. 3l.

Qualitative data archiving: some reflections on its prospects and principles,

Revisiting class qualitative studies’, Forum:

The possibilities and pitfalls of doing a secondary analysis of a qualitative data ser’,

Commentary on 'a Reflexive Account of Reusing Qualitative Data: Beyond Primary/secondary Dualism' (Libby Bishop)

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/12/3/7/7.pdf

Commentary on 'a Reflexive Account of Reusing Qualitative Data: Beyond Primary/secondary Dualism' (Libby Bishop)

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Research Papers in Economics